Microsoft Internet Explorer Users Have Six Weeks To Get Current

January 12th is the deadline for Windows Internet Explorer users to upgrade to the current version of IE or lose support and patches.

Last June Microsoft told the nearly 370 million IE users that they had until January to switch to IE 11.  There are a couple of exceptions.  Windows Vista and Windows  Server 2008 users can run IE9 and Windows Server 2012 users can run IE10.  Everyone else has to upgrade to IE 11 or Microsoft Edge.

Over a hundred million users were running IE9 in November.  Over 70 million users were running IE10.

The good news is that those browsers will continue to work – but Microsoft won’t patch any bugs that hackers find.

And you can count on the fact that hackers will start targeting those users knowing that they are on their own.

Likely the biggest groups of users using elderly versions of IE are large corporations and government entities at all levels – those groups don’t deal with change well.

So, if you are one of those users who are using an outdated version of IE, then you should either upgrade or use an alternative browser such as Chrome or Firefox.

And if you work for one of those organizations that won’t let you do that, hope that they paid for extended support, assuming Microsoft is offering it – which it looks like they are not offering.

For enterprises that need older IE version compatibility, Microsoft has built a number of addins that allow IE11 to act like older versions.  See the article below for more details on that.

Consider yourself alerted.

Information for this post came from Computer World.

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